Zeke Moores won’t complain if you give one of his boxes the boot as long as you don’t sue him for personal injury.

Artist Zeke Moores polishes his fabricated steel porta-john, part of his exhibit at Art Gallery of Windsor. (NICK BRANCACCIO / The Windsor Star)

Those empty beer cases and tomato paste cartons that appear to spray-painted refugees of a dump are actually bronze sculptures.

The Windsor sculptor’s fascinating copies of actual everyday items are part of a new exhibit that focuses on the art of the commonplace.

Besides Moores’ show titled simply Dispose, the Art Gallery of Windsor is hosting a solo exhibit by Toronto’s Hajra Waheed titled Field Notes and Other Backstories.

Her collection of hand-copied passport photos from Lebanon are carefully crafted works of art. She has also compiled collages of newspaper clippings, photos, and vintage postcards in scrapbooks she discovered in garbage bins.

Another part of Waheed’s show is a series of brief films shown on small viewers.

There are 198 images — 99 women and 99 men — drawn from thousands of photos taken by the Armenian-born Antranik Anouchian in Tripoli, Lebanon from the 1930s to the 1990s.

Today, the originals are housed in the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut and document a time of upheaval and change in the Middle East.

Passport photos were the only public images allowed when Waheed was growing up amidst tight security on the Saudi Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia. Her father worked there as a geologist.

“Every year I would go to the passport office to have my picture taken,” said Waheed, 32, who was born in Canada but moved to the Middle East at a young age. “Those photos were distributed by my parents to relatives as a document of me growing up.”

The fact of identity and the legal nature of the passport photo intrigued her.

“A passport is significant on many levels. It not only identifies a person, it also defines one’s notion of freedom of movement, whether one is allowed to cross borders. It has always had a quite profound influence on me.”

If you look at the images from a distance, they appear to be blurry black and white photographs or lithographs. Only when you look closely do you discover Waheed has actually copied the photos by hand, right down to the weave of the paper.

It was a painstaking process in which she acted as “a human printer.”

The mute, nondescript and unidentified people stare out from across nearly a century, allowing the viewer to imagine their stories, Waheed said.

“They could be anybody’s parents or grandparents,” she said. “We begin to ask ourselves what characterizes people of a certain region in our minds, and how and why we tend to superimpose our own ideas about them.”

Moores, meanwhile, challenges our ideas of what is disposable in a collection of extremely realistic sculptures in aluminum, bronze and steel.

A tree stump made of bronze is topped by aluminum castings in the shape of satellite dishes. A 500-pound steel portable toilet commands the view at one end of the gallery. The floor is strewn with bronze boxes and a moving blanket that looks like it could use a good shaking, except for the fact it’s made of aluminum.

“I get comments all the time like ‘What’s the big deal? My kid could spray-paint a box’,” said Moores, 35.

“One of the things I try to convey is that some of the objects we overlook and discard were actually manufactured and required time and technology to produce.

“It’s about trying to understand the world around us through the everyday objects that surround us.”

The Walkerville resident regularly takes walks down Ouellette Avenue and along alleyways for inspiration.

“One of my favourite things to do is to walk downtown on a Sunday morning after the kids are done their partying on Saturday nights,” Moores said. “It’s an interesting sight.”

The aluminum blanket, he said, took six months to finish and involved three separate molds which were welded together. During the molding process, he used dental instruments to add the finer details and texture to the object.

A single beer case can require as much as 60 hours of detailing and grinding after it comes out of the mold.

“I don’t mind if people want to kick or nudge the work to see if it’s real,” he said. “The gallery gets a little annoyed, though.”

The two exhibits opened Friday and continue through June 2. A panel discussion with the artists, titled Lost and Found, will take place today at 2 p.m. Admission is free.

The Art Gallery of Windsor is located at 401 Riverside Dr. W. Go to agw.ca for hours of operation and other information.

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